The Night I Was a Secret Agent

This is how my life works:

I like making the minute details, the little things and situations, the finite moments, into exciting adventures and fun situations. It makes life a little more fun, and it keeps my imagination rolling. Maybe it's an exercise in acting, but either way I enjoy it.

Take tonight for instance: I wanted to go use the computer at the college in Lville after hours. I was on a quest for wi-fi, a miraculous thing that always alludes me when I'm home on break.

The American version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was a surprisingly very good movie.  America actually didn't ruin it, even if it had a couple of flaws. Rooney Mara deserves some kind of award for her performance as Lisbeth. Anyway, I totally felt like a secret agent. This badass.

The engine shudders into silence as I pull the key out of the ignition. The amber lights of the parking lot cast an eerie hue over the empty lot which ripples with snow, and my shadow as I slowly make my way towards the dark building is elongated in the evening light. I sling my bag over my shoulder as I pass into the entryway, the heels of my boots clicking on the pavement. Through the glass door I can see the faint fluorescent lighting in the distant hallway. I cautiously swing the door open and enter. The entry hall is silent---too silent---my breath echoes in reverberating gasps along the high ceiling. I gingerly walk across the glistening, newly waxed floor towards the end of the entry hall. Below the single fluorescent overhead light sits a staircase descending to the basement and across from that stands a grated door. In an instant I decide on the door---the basement would be too much effort---and pull on the grate. It slides open to reveal a small room, longer than it is wide, filled with black chairs and a small wooden table. I rush to a large chair in the corner of the room and pull out my computer just as all the fluorescent light switches off. I am plunged into darkness, only augmented by the faint glow of the moon as it passes through the row of windows behind me. Quickly, I flip my computer open and stare at the tiny icon in the bottom right hand corner as it turns from a red "X" to five white bars in a row. Target acquired.

Being a dork makes life so much more fun. Going back to Btown next week! 

Peace out!

My Everything Hurts

...and within a period of two days, I was packed up and moved out of my wonderful single in UHeights to the tiny double in Wills, but it's not all that bad. Somehow I found a way to take the lofted bed and fit Megan's loveseat under it. It created quite the batcave effect, which has been a pretty awesome addition to the room so far. I'm just waiting this week out now until Joe arrives on Sunday and school starts.

I'm so completely ready for school to start. Everything is in order, schedules have been made, books have been bought (In 14 different orders on Amazon as well as one from UVM.), and supplies have been organized. Megan and I just talked about how exciting it's going to be to pack up our backpacks Sunday night before  the first day of school. I could not be more pumped and ready to go. I'm also super excited about being a TA and doing Hairspray rehearsals.

These all came today.

I actually had quite the stressful day right before getting completely moved out and going home for the weekend. It began when I went to the UVM Residential Life office, like I was told to do, and waited for ten minutes at the front desk until someone came out into the lobby to ask me if anyone had been helping me. Since no one was, the woman went back in and got me the key to my room. Once I was packed up, I moved a bunch (basically everything I owned) to Wills. When I went to lock the door, however, the key wouldn't turn in the lock. After swearing profusely, I ran to the front desk of my new dorm where the office manager was just about to take off for the day. She got me the right key all the while wondering why ResLife gave me the wrong one and where they got it. Needless to say that key worked.

Then, when I tried to turn my computer (Bertha) on to see if there was wireless in my new dorm, the screen fizzled out and went dark. I screamed and raced to the Computer Depot in the Davis Center with my baby clutched in my arms. There they hooked her up to another computer and determined that the problem was probably physical, so I had to send it in to the company. After talking with a thickly accented Indian customer service representative for an hour, we determined that there was definitely something wrong but my warranty had run out. It was cheaper to buy another computer.

Moment of silence for Bertha...........


Now enter Marcus, my new computer, who is very sleek and runs with Windows 7. I'm hoping Marcus will serve me well. This is my first blog post with him, and it's working quite well. Thank you, Costco! (Yes, we got my new computer at Costco.)


This weekend I also got the chance to go see Chase's directorial genius in Hairspray at the Haskell Opera House. I really missed that place from last summer, and I especially missed Lissy (who was amazing in the show), Chase (who needs a Broadway stage, stat), and Kat (who continues to astound me with her stage managing abilities). It was great to see everyone and take in an awesome show.

It was weird to watch the show and then come back to Burlington to start rehearsing it. But rehearse we did. Matt and I have been carpooling to rehearsals and totally rocking them. Hope you can all make it to the show! There will be links up soon over in the right sidebar. ------------------->


In the end: my back, my neck, my arms, my abs, and my legs are killing me. The dances are hard and I was totally drenched in sweat on Sunday but it's totally worth it. I missed working this hard for theatre so much. I felt so broken from lack of theatre (yet again) after having it the whole time last summer, and having this opportunity to perform on the big stage at the Flynn is absolutely amazing. For people like me, and Matt, and Chase, and Lissy, and Kat, anything is worth it for theatre.


And sweat is worth it.


Here are some more pictures from Megan and my drive yesterday to the Champlain Islands. It was a lot of fun and we found some Vermont nut free chocolates!

Another highlight from this weekend:





Peace out!

Beauty

I made the most amazing chocolate chip cookies last weekend. You know you want one.

Friday morning at work I made the most excellent Harry Potter themed weather board in anticipation of the FINAL MOVIE this past weekend.

Jake was supposed to come over this past weekend so we could all go see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 together but unfortunately Jake's car broke down. So, no Jake this weekend, but Megan and I still had a super awesome weekend which began with a lot of crying, cheering, and sobbing. Yes, I did all of those things while watching Harry Potter because to me, and to a whole generation of people, this movie really marks the end of an era. It marks the end of our childhoods, the last thing we grew up with.

I finished my re-read of the series on Friday just as I finished my desk shift. As I walked upstairs, I wiped tears from my eyes thinking about the adventures I had just been through, all the emotions I had felt, and all the lessons I had learned with Harry and his friends. And in one day's time, I knew that it was all going to end.  It's crazy how something so simple can effect people, and how a single story can make connections between people.

My hands shook as the opening credits played and my heart stopped when I remembered Dobby's death. I laughed when Hermione transformed into the evil Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter is a genius.), I cheered when Harry, Ron, and Hermione escaped Gringotts on the back of a dragon, I cried when Professor McGonagall unleashed her rage against the man who had murdered Dumbledore, I shook when Voldemort and the Death Eaters came to Hogwarts and began the battle, I screamed when Nagini murdered Snape and sobbed when Harry learned of Snape's true alliance, I weeped when Harry learned his true destiny and marched into the Forbidden Forest with his family by his side, I smiled when Harry survived the Avada Kedavra curse again only to come back to the castle and fight and win.

It was amazing, and a beautiful ending. To watch Harry send his own children off to Hogwarts was the most brilliant ending there could be. Thank you for these stories J.K. Rowling, you have brought so much joy to so many children with your writing.

On the way to Middlebury to dance in the street - Big Band style.

A U.F.O.! Of course a theatre would have this set up.

The coolest storefront ever.

One thought that's crossed my mind lately is the way actors work. I don't want to give my own tools away because their mine, but most teachers (Hagen, Stanislavski, Strasberg, Meisner, mostly The Method) talk about finding a substitution for the emotional moment of a scene from your own past. For example, if I had a scene where a character was arguing with someone who abandoned him, I would try to think of a moment in my own life when I ever felt abandoned or betrayed to substitute that real emotion into the character. (For me, sometimes this really isn't enough. I like the Practical Aesthetics method introduced by David Mamet which involves create a physical image of a character, imagining the "given circumstances," and then filling in with substitutions and emotions.) Megan brought up the strange dilemma to me when actors stop feeling in real life, and the only way they can express emotion becomes the stage in a character, they're not able to have emotion themselves. It's kind of that image of the "stoic actor" who is very pompous, speaks in monotone, but when they get on the stage they completely transform.

In a way, the stage becomes an actor's form of therapy. But is it crossing a line when an actor can no longer feel in their own lives? I think the answer is yes. Uta Hagen talks about how the actor needs to be a vessel for emotion, and in an interview with Jennifer Anniston that Megan and I were watching, she mentioned how she feels like the actor has a deep well of emotion that they just use. Being that "emotional sponge" is the way an actor becomes a character. Actors have to let emotion effect them. Always. That's how we get the tools we need to play characters. We need to embrace the brilliant happiness and deeply feel sadness and anger in order to convincingly use the entire spectrum of human emotion when creating the aesthetic of a character.

So that's why I cried, laughed, cheered, and sobbed through Harry Potter. Because that's what I felt, and I was filling my well.

Peace out!

Keepin' It Classy In Cape Cod

As I walk down the glass hallway that leads to my room, rain and thunder pound away at the walls, and I realized that I left both of my windows open. I ran down the rest of the hallway, hurriedly unlocked my door, and dashed into my room to windows. I slipped and hydroplaned across the wet tiled floor and slammed into the windows, stubbing my toe and falling on my ass. This is no joke.

Btown just had a huge storm. While I was walking to the library it looked like the sky was in half with beautiful sunshine, and the other half was completely black. While I was coming back, it was like the storm was chasing me.

The banner I just made for my next group arriving to UVM.

This have been good since Megan and I came back to Vermont from our wonderful trip to Cape Cod, but I still wish we were there. It was a trip we've been trying to keep secret from the Internet because we were trying to surprise Ashley. We definitely succeeded in surprising her, and in rocking out the Cape. We did so much and we traveled all around, it would be really hard for me to go into detail for our entire trip. So here is a list of all the beautiful things we did. Hope you enjoy:

- We hiked around in Franconia Notch and the Basin

- We stopped in Plymouth, NH to surprise Eden then the three of us visited her awesome new apartment
- We stopped off in Cambridge on our way through Boston to find Harvard University, then got lost in Boston, and screamed as we drove through tunnels
- We named out GPS "Susan" and swore at her
- We sat in traffic, got flipped off, and got cut off
- We successfully surprised Ashley when she answered the front door and saw us standing there.

"WHAT THE FUCK! SINCE WHEN ARE YOU HERE!? FUCKING FUCK!"

- We got chewed by bugs
- We learned that Cape Cod belongs to Jesus

- Ashley gave us a tour of the Christmas Tree Shop
- We watched clouds descend onto the land
- We fought seagulls, hawks, and llamas
- We attempted to take a picture on the beach, but the sky was too bright, and Megan got sand in her eye

- We traveled to Provincetown and stopped by the National Seashore along the way

- We explored Ptown

- We went to an authentic Portuguese bakery and got fried dough and other yummy baked goods

- We made it to the end of the jetty

- We went clubbing at Pufferbellies in Hyannis twice, and met Ashley's friend John
- We met a group of Irish who were working on the Cape during the summer and were being discriminated against and being threatened to be kicked out of their apartment. But they were hilarious and had the best accents ever.
- We had a Ben and Jerry's buffet

- I broke my glasses, and then got them fixed in Falmouth
- We went to a toy store

- We went to a beautiful lighthouse on our way to Woods Hole

- We couldn't find parking in Woods Hole
- We couldn't go to Nantucket
- We went to the JFK Monument in Hyannis
- We went to a Zooquarium in Yarmouth and met a variety of different animals, especially the peacock we named Shannequa...because (s)he's sassy.

- We hiked two "Braille Trails" meant for blind people but I think if a blind person tried to walk either of these trails, they would die. Seriously dangerous.

- We frolicked in the woods and on playgrounds

- We met Vince and Laurie's (Ashley awesome parents') mannequin named Wayne

- We went to the beach and got totally sunburned.

- We attempted to ride this crazy paddleboat thing, but it was very hard to paddle in the ocean's currents and after about a million times flipping it over ad falling on rocks, we were done.

I paddled like Sawyer from LOST. Get it.

- We explored Main Street Hyannis including a creepy arcade with a sketchy bathroom where I thought I was going to be raped. Or murdered. Or both.
- We went to Nickerson State Park and tried to have a campfire. Emphasis on tried. Ashley and I did have a sword fight however, and we did eat Oreos with melted chocolate on them. Oh, and we hula-hooped, and we showed a group of kids how to use a piece of equipment on the playground.

- We went to the National Seashore Visitor's Center and checked out the surrounding area. I found a stage and danced on it.

- We went to the Drive-In and watched Cars 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. But it was really more about the Drive-In experience. It's so much better than a cinema.

- We met Ashley's very shy cat named Bandit.

- We went to Scargo Tower in Dennis and saw a lake shaped like a fish

- We walked the beach

-We went to the Salem Witch Museum on the way home and discovered how prejudice in America causes modern day witch hunts. Way to go America. Again.

We had an amazing and wonderful trip. Thank you Laurie and Vince for letting us squat in your house for a week. Thank you Ashley for showing us Cape Cod. We loved it.

Peace out!